A Son of the Rock

TTA Press, 96 p

In her guest Editorial Kristi deMeester tells how her story in this issue was generated. Andy Hedgecock considers cities in Future Interrupted^a. In Aliya Whiteley’s Climbing Stories^b she ponders the mysterious processes that go into constructing – and choosing from – a tbr pile.
In Book Zone Andy Hedgecock lauds Nina Allan’s The Dollmaker as literary fantasy at its most ambitious, erudite and entertaining and also interviews the author, I compare Chris Beckett’s Beneath the World a Sea to the best fiction for its exploration of the nature of humanity but am slightly less enthusiastic about The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders for lacking something in urgency, Juliet E McKenna finds secondary world fantasy The Resurrectionist of Calligo by Wendy Trimboli & Alicia Zaloga highly enjoyable, Ian Hunter rejoices in the delights of New Maps: More Uncollected John Sladek edited by David Langford, Maureen Kincaid Speller^c respects the novels by Ian McDonald (of which Luna: Moon Rising is the third) but cannot love them and welcomes the SF-ness of AfroSFv3 edited by Ivor W Hartmann but also for the reminder that while society and SF have made great strides in increasing representation recently, there is still some way to go.
In the fiction:-
The Verum¹ of Storm Humbert’s story is a new kind of drug which delivers experiences which seem real. The narrator is the purveyor of choice for verum, until Regina comes along. The denouement is not what you might expect from this set-up.
The weasel virus turns women’s reproductive organs to mush while killing them. As a preventive measure all as yet unaffected women have had hysterectomies, hence there will be no new humans ever again. Our narrator is working on a Sesame Street-like TV series called Gumdrop Road which is using the preserved bodies of dead children (their brains implanted with computers connected to their nervous systems) to simulate former normality. This is the world of Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse?² by Erica L Satifka. The afterword tells us it has been brought to us by the letter P and the emotion despair.
The Frog’s Prince; Or, Iron Henry by N A Sulway is a kind of modern day fairy tale, or variant of one. The titular frog’s ‘prince’ suffers from an unusual curse: to have “no daughter of a woman born.” After turning the frog into a boy – and a lover – he several times turns him into a woman in order to bypass the curse.
A girl is lost in the eponymous mall of The Princess of Solomon Pond Mall by Timothy Mudie. Living things wink out of existence when she sees them. Her only contact with the outside world is through the food drops and robot parachuted in to her by the military looking to exploit her powers.
In Heaven Looks Down on the Tomb by Gregor Hartmann all human life on Earth has long since been eradicated. Those on the moon survived and now a few of their descendants have come down to Earth to try to harness any possible useful bacteria. Factions on the Moon complicate things, though.
In FiGen: A Love Story³ by Kristi deMeester the titular FiGen is a company which claims to be able to predict the likelihood of a spouse having an affair from a genetic sample. Our female narrator attempts to pre-empt the situation.

Pedant’s corner:- ^aJeffries’ (Jeffries’s, several instances) “Jeffries’ vision is in tune twenty-first century pessimism” (Jeffries’s vision is in tune with twenty-first century pessimism.) ^b“that is understandable given situation” (given the situation,) Nichelle Nicols’ (Nicols’s,) Billy Dee Williams’ (Billy Dee Williams’s.) ^cRobrerts’ (Roberts’s,) Garth Ennis’ (Eniss’s.)
All the fiction was written in USian. ¹“a smattering of leaves huddle” (a smattering huddles,) maw (it’s a stomach, not a mouth.) ²“lay down” (lie down.) ³“expensive whiskies[sic] drank neat” (drunk neat,) “as if I needed reminding of whom you were” (extra marks for the use of ‘whom’ elsewhere but here it is the subject of ‘were’; so, ‘of who you were’.)